Er, it kind of predicts the internet, but everything else?

Quebec separatism? Corporate sponsored calendar? All of North America under the same flag? Dumping toxic waste in/on Québec instead of Africa ?

none of things actually happened

Personally speaking, I found the book very 'awe-inspiring'/it made me go 'wow' a bunch, because I found the author's experience so completely different from my own :)

It'll probably take me a while to grok it all, but I appreciate you taking the time to educate me, thank you ^^

I have a hard time seeing how "I'd like to live in a world where everyone is equally cared for" accidentally leads to "others must suffer for me to be better cared for than any other human who has ever lived", but then again I'm not exactly an intelligent person so I can struggle to understand these sorts of things :)

s/hard worker/person with more capital/

I can make 500 euros from a day of consulting as a software engineer. That's a typical day, working remotely, 9AM to 5PM, with a nice long lunch break.

Minimum wage in Bangladesh is around $133 per month. Many workers in the Bangladesh garment industry work 12 hour days. I look at what they do, and think "wow that's really hard I could never do that, glad I don't have to work that hard to live".

Yet somehow, I have exponentially more money than they do. And, thanks to the beauty of our current system, I can go ahead and invest that in the stock market, and get even richer while basically doing nothing.

It would be nice if we lived in a word that rewarded hard work, but as far as I can tell, we don't, and never have.

Look at the institution of slavery. For literally thousands of years, there was "those who worked", and "those who had".

The system rewards decision making, not hard work.

Now, if you're a young tech worker working on an important project at a big company, yes, choosing to work hard, IN THAT SPECIFIC CASE is a good decision, and it'll be rewarded.

But if you're a child laborer in a Third World sweatshop? No, your extra hour at the office probably won't get you anything extra.

If you're a Roman Senator in the year 30BC, you don't get rewarded for your work, you get rewarded for deciding to have your slaves spend more time farming grapes for wine and less farming wheat because wine sells for a higher price, which means that with your good decision making, you can now hire more slaves, to farm more grapes, to make more wine, which you can make for more money.

And if you look at rich people today, what they have is probably closer to the Roman Senator than the Third World sweatshop laborer - they find a thing that people like to buy, and invest lots of resources (their money, other people's labor) into making that thing and selling it, and are rewarded with money.

I'm sorry if that offends anyone reading this, you can downvote me out of spite if that makes you feel better.

I say this because I read a while ago (like years) an article in the Economist showing that happiness in a society is correlated with equality - (sorry for the dash I am a human I just happen to use em dashes sometimes) not just amongst the poor, but also for the rich.

You'll note that rich people in highly unequal societies tend to struggle with mental illness more than in equal societies.

Money doesn't buy happiness. Being filthy rich won't heal the hurt in your heart. If you're too stupid too realize that, that's fine, enjoy your suffering, but I'd appreciate you having the honesty to admit that you're a deluded moron instead of trying to create completely false arguments for why the misery you're creating for yourself and others is actually a sign of anything less than pure human stupidity.

I couldn't find the original Economist article, nor the study it cited, but here's a link I found on Google.

https://leftfootforward.org/2017/03/people-are-happier-in-mo...

If you have a machine that makes widgets, which requires people to operate, the machine (capital) without anyone operating it (labor) is worthless, but if you have people (labor) without any machine (capital), you won't have any widgets.

I feel like this is one of those situations where "the whole is larger than the sum of the parts" - combining the power of capital and labor, you get much more value than just capital or just labor.

Of course, this does NOT imply that "I provided the capital, it couldn't have happened without me, ergo I deserve all the rewards" is true, even if, if we look at the history and current state of the world, generally speaking it is more advantageous to provide capital than it is to provide labor.

It used to be "oh, why am I getting an error on line 352, let me google the error message and wade through Stack Overflow answers" now it's "Claude, why am I getting an error on line 352? Ah, it's because $REASON, let's see if that fixes it, yes, thank you."

Obviously reading the official documentation is very useful, but sometimes you can't find anything that relevant to your exact use case, and forums are also very useful, but it can take hours or even days to get a reply to question when the LLM can do it in like a minute.

there's a difference between having the LLM write stuff for you, checking it yourself, modifying it and merging it yourself, and just blindly trusting it to do whatever it wants.

You can ask an overseas consultant to prepare a prototype of your program for you, check it yourself, and only use it if it passes your standards, or fire your whole dev team and blindly trust the overseas bodyshop.

The difference, at least from my point of view, between "using" and "outsourcing" is that in the former case, you're still responsible for the output, you view it as a tool that helps in some use cases, vs just giving up all control.

I studied maths, and spending time alone trying to solve problems and redoing the proofs from memory was important for my learning.

I don't think I'd have learned as much had those moments been replaced with more in class discussion.

HN, on the other hand, everyone has the same front page. If I like a post I can favorite it to 'bookmark' it, but HN won't modify my front page based on what I favorite, whereas facebook will.

I think the GP's argument is, when it comes to social media, "one size fits all" might be less addictive than "custom made" :)

Fascism isn't government making laws, fascism is "we're the superior race, kill anyone who disagrees".

I wouldn't call this move fascism, even if can be considered a bit heavy handed.

If their product is "access to a big model running on a really big computer" (if we can count 'multiple data-centers' as a single enormous distributed computer), then the product "small, accessible device that everyone has" risks killing their cash cow.

Ironically enough, the first company to really focus on "an LLM in every phone" will have a good shot at actually being the ones that "changed everythingTM", in the way Microsoft changed the world from IBM mainframes to PCs, or Apple made smartphones a thing.

Excellent work, thank you for sharing it with us ^_^

Yes there are only 2 hard problems in computer science - caching, naming things, and off by one errors.

Yes, but how much of that was luck and how was extraordinary talent?

It's like saying "Donald Trump is really rich, ergo he must be a financial genius"... getting really rich isn't that hard if you're born into money and invest in New York real estate.

Now someone like Jobs who had fairly working class parents and founded a multi-billion dollar (now trillion dollar) company that radically changed the modern world, that, I would argue, is extraordinary talent.

While I don't personally have much an opinion on Ives's skill as a designer, I understand the GP's point of view - any "good but not great" designer could have done what he did, Ives was just lucky enough to win the lottery w.r.t. what company he worked for.

For a similar example, consider the case of Hollywood - you'll have plenty actors as talented as Brad Pitt (or whatever big name you'd like to choose) that don't end up staring in massive blockbusters, not because they lack talent, but because they weren't quite as lucky to get that first big break, which led to more recognition, more job offers, all of which compounded into making him a proper movie star. Obviously Pitt is a really good actor, but part of his success is likely due to luck as much as it is acting talent - he has tons of talent, but others might have equal talent and less luck, and therefore be less successful/have fewer people influenced by their work.

To use a software metaphor, consider the relative popularity of FreeBSD and Linux. Both are good OSes, but Linux got "luckier" because they didn't have to deal with a lawsuit, which meant it got more attention, more features, which led to a compounding "Matthew effect" where it now has a far larger market share than FreeBSD, despite them originally having roughly the same 'quality'.

I am not sure that this statement is completely true in all cases.

Take for example the Roman conquest of the Mediterranean. Romans tended to win their wars because they had superior organization - they could field more armies, and equip those armies, better than their adversaries, even if their adversaries had better commanders (eg Hannibal).

Once conquered by the Romans, the indigenous population got access to all the benefits of being part of Rome's 'empire' - access to what was then one of the largest trade network, the roads, the aqueducts, the Roman legal system...

I do believe, although, not being a professional historian I have the humility to admit my belief could be wrong, than overall being conquered by the Romans led to an overall increase in living standards for the local population.

Or consider the brutal conquest of what is now Mexico by the Spanish. We rightly remember the conquistadors as being incredibly violent and oppressive, but if large swaths of the local population chose to join them in their assault on the Aztec empire, it may have been because the Aztecs were even more violent - indeed, if my understanding of Aztec culture is correct, the Aztec religion required a human sacrifice every day to ensure that the sun would rise. Compared to that, arguably even the Spanish Inquisition is a step up.

Finally, consider that the practice of slavery in what is now Algeria ended only in 1830, when the French colonized it. Now you can accuse the French colonizers of being vicious brutes (and you'd have a lot of evidence to support that claim), but... at least they weren't enslaving anyone. Of course, this last point makes a value judgement that basically boils down to "slavery is always bad", if you have a value system where "some things, including colonization/colonial/imperialist violence are worse than slavery, then you can safely discount it ^_^

Example- Linus Torvalds, never worked for a company, made the original Linux while a grad student, and seems to be doing fine (I'm writing this message on a ThinkPad running Linux Mint). Or Bill Joy with BSD at Berkley, before his time at Sun. Or heck, why not go all the way back to Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie building Unix and C?